Is God Is Review: Vengeance, Violence, and Voice to Black Rage

Playwright Aleshea Harris makes her feature directorial debut with Is God Is, a blistering revenge thriller released in US cinemas on 15 May 2026, in which twin sisters Racine and Anaia are sent by their dying mother — whom they call God — on a cross-country mission to kill the father who burned them alive as children.

A mission from God — and a mother

Racine (Young) and Anaia (Johnson) are inseparable. They share janitorial shifts, finish each other’s sentences in silent stares rendered on screen through on-screen titles, and carry identical scars: Racine’s left arm scorched; Anaia’s face and chest mapped in keloid ridges. Then a letter arrives from a woman they believed dead. Their mother — God — is alive, bedridden in the Deep South and covered in her own burns.

Her request is simple and monstrous in equal measure: find the man who set the fire and make him pay. From that commanding premise, Harris constructs something genuinely rare — a revenge film whose violence is never cathartic in the usual grindhouse sense, but instead functions as a kind of tragic mythology, a cycle spinning just slightly too fast to stop.

Harris draws explicitly on Greek tragedy and the Old Testament alongside spaghetti westerns and the stylistic swagger of Quentin Tarantino — but the synthesis feels entirely her own. The twins’ beat-up Oldsmobile becomes their chariot. Each stop on their journey — a cult-like church presided over by a preacher woman, a lawyer literally stripped of his tongue by the man they hunt — echoes ancient stories of retribution filtered through a distinctly Black American lens.

Young and Johnson: two performances that refuse to be forgotten

It is almost impossible to overstate what Kara Young and Mallori Johnson accomplish here. Harris gave them roles of extraordinary complexity — women shaped by decades of compounded trauma who are simultaneously ill-equipped for an epic quest and figuring it out in real time. Neither performer ever tips into self-pity or hollow rage. The result is a duo whose chemistry feels genuinely psychic, which is exactly what the film demands.

Johnson’s Anaia — the more hesitant of the two, her disfigurement more visible on her face — carries the film’s moral compass without ever being reduced to the cautious one. Young’s Racine functions as the engine: blunt, furious, and achingly funny in the same breath. When she swings a rock in a sock, the biblical reference lands without a word of explanation.

The supporting cast circles them with precision. Vivica A. Fox gets a single extended scene as God and demolishes it. Sterling K. Brown spends most of the film as a rumour — glimpsed only in fragments and flashbacks — until a late confrontation that forces an unexpected re-evaluation of everything the twins believe they know. The script uses that withholding masterfully.

Genre-blending that earns every tonal shift

What is most disarming about Is God Is is how thoroughly Harris refuses to let the film settle into any single register. It is a spaghetti western and a Greek tragedy and an Afropunk fable and a dark comedy, sometimes across consecutive scenes. The tonal acrobatics could easily read as undisciplined. Instead they feel like deliberate emotional instruments — each shift recalibrating the audience’s relationship with violence and culpability.

The episodic, vignette-like structure lets Harris make her political arguments without stopping the film dead to deliver them. Her targets are precise: the abusive men who initiate cycles of violence, the women who enable them, and the younger men they corrupt. The Boondocks comparison that some critics have reached for is apt — Harris is doing something similarly bold with genre conventions, exposing the rot underneath familiar archetypes.

There are legitimate criticisms. The ending accelerates past the emotional closure the story has earned, and a detour or two in the film’s middle section lands on comedy more than depth. Jourdain Searles, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, noted that the visual palette of the South feels occasionally too sparse for a story of this scale. That is a fair charge. But it is a charge you level at a film that has already given you so much to reckon with that the lack feels like an oversight rather than a failure of ambition.

UK release and streaming

The verdict

Is God Is is one of those films that arrives fully formed, as though its maker has been waiting a long time to say exactly this, in exactly this way. Harris does not hedge. She does not soften the fury at the centre of her story or apologise for the lengths her characters go to in pursuit of something the film refuses to call justice — because justice is not quite what this is.

What it is, finally, is a cathartic and devastating work about what happens to rage when it has nowhere legitimate to go: it turns inward, it turns outward, it burns. Harris has built a film out of that fire, and it is extraordinary.

Is God Is is now playing in theaters. You can watch the trailer below.

For further context on the year’s most talked-about debut, see also: Kristen Stewart returns to A24 for another bold independent feature and our recent coverage of Matt Reeves teasing the next chapter of prestige blockbuster filmmaking.